Key facts:
Buterin sees it as a “bad idea” to ban the use of proof of work used in mining.
The developer proposes to create a fee for the carbon emission generated by PoW.
The developer and co-founder of the Ethereum network, Vitalik Buterin, surprisingly took a favorable stance towards mining cryptocurrencies based on Proof of Work (PoW) such as Bitcoin (BTC).
Although this may seem contradictory, especially since Buterin has expressed on other occasions that cryptocurrency mining is not ecological. What the Russian-Canadian developer said is related to freedom that it considers must exist so that each protocol makes use of the energy that it considers.
Buterin Indian, specifically, “I am opposed to banning PoW. For the government to pick and choose which specific applications make good use of electricity or not, that’s a bad idea.”
In that sense, he suggests that the solution could be “to implement carbon pricing and use some of the revenue to compensate low-income users.”
“Of course, in the absence of perfect compensation for externalities (ie the current status quo), we still have moral responsibilities,” Buterin added on Twitter.
Buterin’s reaction came after New York lawmakers passed a bill to prohibit certain operations of the bitcoin mining that run on carbon-based energy sources. If the law is approved by Governor Kathy Hochul, that state would become the first territory of the United States in prohibiting this type of mining, said the US network CNBC.
Buterin goes ahead with Ethereum 2.0
Buterin also winked at the proof of work, assuring that it allowed a better distribution of the ether cryptocurrency (ETH) in all these years, as reported by CriptoNoticias.
Although a simple Proof of Staking (PoS) could have been used in the early days of the network, but this would have attacked his abilitysaid.
This partial defense of PoW will not prevent the transition to Ethereum 2.0, which is scheduled to be completed in the second half of this year, after being postponed at the end of May.
When this happens, the network will no longer work with the algorithm work test (i.e. the method of validating new transactions and receiving a reward for it), but will switch to using proof of stake.
The developer has also been critical of PoW, considering that in addition to the pollution of Bitcoin mining, it is much more difficult to mine on a large scale without being discovered, while the PoS mechanism, based on capital and softwareit is more resistant to censorshipaccording to Buterin.